Translated from Spanish by Tony Frazer and Terence Dooley
Published 2025, exact date tbc. Paperback, 236pp, 9 x 6ins, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848618640 [Download a sample PDF from this book here.]

The Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948) is one of the most important figures in 20th-century Hispanic poetry and, with César Vallejo, one of the pioneering avant-gardists in Spanish. Originally from an upper-class Santiago family, Huidobro was fortunate to have the means to support himself and his family while he found his artistic way. After an early phase writing in a quasi-symbolist style in his native city, he moved to Paris and threw himself into the local artistic milieu with a passion, quickly becoming a notable figure, publishing a large number of books in the period 1917–1925. Influenced initially by Apollinaire, Huidobro quickly befriended both forward-looking French writers such as Reverdy, Cocteau and Radiguet, and the Spanish expatriate artists, including Picasso and Juan Gris.

He reached his poetic maturity in 1931 with the publication of two masterpieces: the long poem, Altazor , and the book-length prose-poem Temblor de cielo (Skyquake). Two further collections would follow during his lifetime, both published in Santiago in 1941. While he also published successful novels and plays, it is for his poetry that he is best remembered today.

Altazor is increasingly seen as one of the key works of the 20th-century Hispanic avant-garde in poetry. Apparently put together over several years, it looks back in part to the ground-breaking volume Ecuatorial (1918), imbibes a number of futurist tropes from that same era, takes in the surrealist wave that took hold in the mid-1920s, and ends with shattered pieces of language that admit perhaps of the impossibility of finishing the work coherently, while also nodding towards a more pessimistic view of the world than that which Huidobro would have espoused as a younger man in Cubist Paris. In amongst all this, the eponymous protagonist flies high and low, taking in the heavens and the depths of hell, both Dedalus and Orpheus. While the book evidently left his contemporaries puzzled, and had minimal initial impact, Altazor today looks uncannily prophetic, even post-modern, in its emphasis on verbal games and trickery, on defamiliarisation, and its being comfortable with a lack of a firm conclusion. Huidobro even boasted of this “failure” in a letter to Buñuel, referencing Lautréamont and Rimbaud as other “failures” whose company he was glad to keep.

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